The Power of Habit - So You Like Your Oreo Fix

This is another idea I got from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: a great way of quitting bad habits is to not get into them in the first place. Here's an example:

Recently, I've been stopping by a 7-11 on my way home from work and picking up a snack - such as oreos. This happens fairly regularly - at around 6:30 on weekdays, I'll pick up my oreos and then go on my way home.

After about two weeks of doing this, I noticed that at around 6:30 every weekday, I develop a terrible craving for oreos, and feel a tremendous urge to go into that 7-11 and pick them up. Skipping my 7-11 visit has started to require incredible amounts of willpower.

So what happened? Using Duhigg's Habit Loop model, I realized that I had classically conditioned myself to expect oreos at 6:30 on weekdays. This means that my body had been trained to expect them, and so the anticipation manifested as the craving that was so difficult to resist.

Using the Habit Loop model, my cue is the time of day and the sight of 7-11. The behaviour is buying and eating oreos, and the reward is the sugar rush I get from it. After an extended period reinforcing this loop for my brain, seeing the cue was enough for my brain to start anticipating the reward, resulting in a manufactured craving that wouldn't go away until I partook in the behaviour that resulted in the reward.

Now how to fix this - giving up my oreos completely is not something I'm willing to do. I love oreos and am unashamed of my indulgence. The problem is that I want to eat oreos when I actually feel like eating them, and not because my body is manufacturing a craving just because it happens to be expecting them.

The solution, as I've gleaned from Duhigg, is to keep my oreo supply unpredictable. By preventing the association between any single cue and my oreos, I can keep my brain from automating away the behaviour by forming a habit. This way, every time I buy oreos, it will be conscious decision that I will likely have thought through, and not automatic behaviour.

It's difficult to do this when you have a regular job with regular hours, but I could get around this, for example, by varying up the source of my oreos. I could get them from 7-11 one day, and then get them from Jewel or Target the next time. I could also vary up the time - maybe I could get them with lunch one time, and the on the way home the next time. Finally, I could also vary up the frequency - I could eat oreos for two successive days, and then skip three days, and then eat the following day.

So remember: our brains are automation machines. Don't let them automate bad habits. Bad habits are easy to build and hard to get rid of. You don't need to completely stop a behaviour in order to prevent the bad habit from forming - you can do it by varying up the cue and hence prevent the cue-reward association from forming. After all, life is short, and we all deserve the occasional oreo fix. :)

Here's the affiliate link to the The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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The Power of Habit - Willpower

I'm about halfway through The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg now, and ever since his note on Keystone Habits, the book has been dragging on for a bit. I'm going to ignore his ramblings on organizational change and focus on the part that stood out to me the most in my reading today: his commentary on willpower and its role in habit formation.

I learned somewhere in High School the analogy that willpower is a finite resource. The more you use it, the more it gets depleted. Somehow, I feel like I internalized this in such a way that because willpower is a scarce resource, it should be conserved to be used when important. For example, I considered it okay to binge on snacks and junk food during exam-time when I had to use my willpower to focus on studying.

The Power of Habit likens willpower to be more like a muscle. The more you use it, he claims, the stronger it gets. This analogy is interesting because if it's more accurate than my idea of a finite resource, then my attitude towards willpower is like that of a man who is afraid that he might need to run someday, so he conserves his ability to run by never running. Of course, muscles being what they are, such a man would soon not be able to run very far at all.

The Power of Habit's suggestion (I had to weave through a good one-sixth of the book before I was able to distill it out) is that we can improve willpower by pre-planning our habits. So for instance, if you would like to get into the habit of ironing your clothes for the next day when you get home from work today, you should visualize in the morning how you're going to feel when you get home, how tired you'll be, and how you'll overcome that tiredness to power through and iron your clothes.

Another way of looking at it is that you would be "priming" yourself into making falling into the routine of ironing your clothes easier.

Here's what you can do: think of a habit you want to develop. It might be ironing your clothes at a certain time, or writing a blog post before bed, or cooking dinner instead of eating out. Visualize the crux moment when you usually give into temptation and ignore the task/chore you need to do and imagine yourself overcoming it. Do this everyday in the morning and hold on to it until you are able to develop the habit.

Here's the affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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